digital media ecology
The immersive, turbulent, mediatized flow.
It’s the social system technology is embedded in that matters.
digital media ecology
We're developing new cognitive abilities. We just don't know what they are yet.
MLIScardcatalogforlife.substack.com
The deeper I went, the more I noticed this phenomenon all around me: individuals not guided by legible principles or beliefs, but acting as members of groups playing yin to the other’s yang—well versus weak; awake versus sheep; righteous versus depraved. Binaries where thinking once lived.
Naomi Klein • Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World
us versus them tribalism
The more we accept the premise that we must be online for everything—liking, loathing, sharing—and the more we accept the tacit contract of trading privacy in exchange for app-enabled convenience, the more data points tech companies are able to hoover up about us. And with that data, they create our real digital doppelgangers—not the aspirational
... See moreNaomi Klein • Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World
The digitally converged world is simultaneously hot and cool, real and faked, commercial and nonprofit, entertaining and political, interactive and passive—it blurs and melds everything together. Our infinite commercial choices and personal expressions are layered through complex networked relationships among media.
Zac Gershberg • The Paradox of Democracy
the cultural chaos of fragmentation that displaced the comfortable universal norms of appointment television.
Zac Gershberg • The Paradox of Democracy
The only way to stand out in this miasma has been appeals to identity and power.
Zac Gershberg • The Paradox of Democracy
Fragmented attention serves platforms better than focused attention because fragmented users scroll more, click more, engage more, and stay online longer. Platforms discovered that shorter bursts of content keep people engaged more effectively than longer, deeper content. They built systems that reward and train fragmented attention.
This created a... See more
This created a... See more
What Scrolling Did to Reading
the internet, as a social and cultural space is almost entirely performance. The whole apparatus has been hollowed into a content mill that grinds human attention into micro-conversions.